Roberto Alagna

Born in France of Sicilian parents, Roberto Alagna studied music in
Paris. He gained notoriety by winning first prize in the 1988
Luciano Pavarotti Competition and soon made his stage debut as
Alfredo in La Traviata with the Glyndebourne Touring Opera Company,
soon to be followed by debuts in Montpellier, Monte Carlo, and the
Teatro alla Scala in Milan (also in La Traviata). His Teatro alla
Scala debut came at the invitation of Riccardo Muti in a fabled
production with Tiziana Fabbricini which was telecast. In 1990 he
sang Rodolfo in Puccini's La Bohème -- a role that has become one
of his most popular; it was also the role of his Covent Garden
Opera debut in 1992 and his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1996.
Another role which was very important during the early part of his
career was the title role in Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, which he
has sung with great success in Paris, London, and New York. This
role proved to be even more important for his personal life, as he
met his second wife, Angela Gheorghiu, while they were performing
this opera together. His first wife had died after a lengthy
illness, and this new romance brought a renewed warmth and passion
to his performances. Their performances of L'elisir d'amore, La
Bohème, and Werther are greatly admired, and together the two
became one of opera's few genuine double attractions, but separated
for a period beginning in 2009 and eventually divorced in 2013. He
then began a relationship with soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, marrying
her in 2015, and again becoming part of a coupled attaction on
stage and recordings. Alagna is known to introduce acrobatic tricks
into productions of L'elisir d'amore which few other tenors would
attempt. His appearances in 1996 at the Theatre-Chatelet Paris and
Covent Garden Opera, London, as Don Carlo in the original French
version of Verdi's opera has helped bring the French edition back
to the fore. Other operas which have proved successful for Alagna
are Rigoletto, Macbeth, Lucia di Lammermoor, Roberto Devereux,
L'amico Fritz, Carmen, and La Rondine. Alagna is a self-taught
tenor who learned his craft by listening to recordings to pick up
ideas and find those that work for him. He usually mentions two of
his predecessors when asked whose recordings were most influential;
these are Beniamino Gigli and Nicolai Gedda. He feels his voice is
like Gedda's in its brightness and timber. His recordings of La
Bohème on Decca and Romeo et Juliette on EMI display some attempts
at the vocal refinements which characterized Gedda's singing.
Alagna's willingness to step beyond the standard score is displayed
in the use of an alternative version of "Una furtiva lágrima" in
his London recording of L'elisir d'amore, using the new critical
edition of La Bohème in the Decca recording with Chailly, as well
as singing the original French version of Don Carlo. His voice is a
very fine lyric tenor with a bright and ringing upper register, but
when it is put under pressure it tends to turn harsh. With the
assumption on stage and on recording of Verdi's Don Carlo and both
Werther and Manon of Massenet, Alagna moved into more dramatic
roles, and in his recordings of the early 2000s he moved easily
around the heart of the operatic repertory.

Looking over a pile of recital albums by operatic tenors, a person could easily conclude that there are only a dozen or so arias out there to be sung -- over and over. Not so here. Although its title, Nessun Dorma, suggests otherwise, Roberto Alagna's latest solo album is loaded with arias that will be familiar only to those who know obscure verismo works like Umberto Giordano's La cena delle beffe or Leoncavallo's La bohème, which has been eclipsed by Puccini's opera of the same name. The result is an interesting, and mostly well sung, album that gives a number of neglected operas a moment in the sun. Curiously, the few chestnuts on the album are the least musically satisfying. Alagna sounds unsettled in the titular "Nessun dorma" and occasionally pushed beyond his vocal limits in selections from Giordano's Andrea Chénier and Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana. The opening of "Cielo e mar!" from Ponchielli's La Gioconda even reveals an alarmingly fuzzy, rough vocal quality. But Alagna finds his stride in "Giulietta, son io" from Zandonai's Giulietto e Romeo -- managing to capture a desperate emotionalism without overstressing himself -- and in general delivers much better performances in the less familiar material. Heartfelt and exciting performances of immediately appealing selections from Leoncavallo's Zingari and Chatterton, and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari's Sly beg the question of why these arias (maybe even the operas themselves) aren't heard more often. The upshot is that Nessun Dorma opens a window on the emotionally charged and sumptuous world of late nineteenth century Italian opera, and establishes Alagna as an interesting interpreter of that material. Throughout, Mark Elder and the Royal Opera House Orchestra Covent Garden play with color and electricity, lending weight and pathos to the entire album.

Sicilian-French tenor Roberto Alagna continues with his bid for superstardom, an effort that has involved performing crossover material in quantities comparable to some of his illustrious tenor ancestors. Among his strong points here, in addition to a really compelling high C that he doesn't just throw around, is that he tends to find really unusual popular material to replace the Neapolitan songs that were musical common coin in Caruso's day, or even the big pop ballads that worked in Domingo's. Here Alagna unearths the repertory of post-World War II French pop singer Luis Mariano, whose voice first made an impression on him when he was 10. For most listeners outside of France, Mariano will be little more than a name, but the songs for which he was famous work well in drawing out Alagna's playful personality and in exploiting his ability to shift vocal personalities in pop material. Various composers are represented; the most frequent is the Basque-born Francís López, whose Spanish- and Mexican-flavored French songs had the lush quality familiar to American listeners from dozens of easy listening arrangements. Alagna does well with songs like México, track 1, and he manages to bring the listener on board with his enjoyment of fluff like Noël Roux's Salade de fruits (Fruit Salad). Alagna's accented but not uncomfortable readings of two Cole Porter songs, "C'est magnifique!" and "I Love Paris," will satisfy English-speaking listeners, but the copy of the disc examined had booklet notes and song texts (except for the Porter items) in no language other than French. Even if translations had been provided they wouldn't have helped much, for the booklet design renders the text virtually unreadable. The album also stumbles with the inclusion of several duets with vocally undistinguished French pop stars and even rugged movie star Jean Reno; these break up the momentum Alagna generates. Nevertheless, the tenor takes another step with this release toward creating the sense of relaxed fun that will put him in the Three Tenors territory.

This is an intact reissue of Roberto Alagna's Christmas album of 2000, complete with its original booklet notes. Those notes explain that Alagna, an professed admirer of Mario Lanza, wanted to create "an album reminiscent of some of the great 'Hollywood' recordings, with a full symphony orchestra and various groups of singers and rhythm-section musicians where appropriate." In the event, that's not quite what he came up with, but the final product has proven successful enough for a fresh go-round on store shelves and web pages. The key to his success is that a really surprising variety of material is matched by a repertoire of vocal manner that may well even appeal to operatic purists who would otherwise toss this disc. There are a few familiar hymns, several of them compressed into medleys with English children's choirs on full-bore cute setting. But there are also some genuinely unusual items. Are you familiar with the strangely melancholy minor-key Guardian Angels, co-written by none other than Harpo Marx? Alagna gives it an enthusiastically Neapolitan reading. The variety of voices Alagna adopts over the course of this album is truly impressive. He croons in White Christmas (this final track is perhaps the album's least successful). He emulates Domingo's attempts at a pop anthem on The Love of a Child. He goes into a fine traditional Italian tenor encore mode for Adeste Fideles, conveys a cheerful domesticity on Away in a Manger (his English is accented but clear and never unpleasant), and gives shining sacred consistency not only to Ave Maria but also to the Romanian carol O! Ce veste minunata!, which was suggested by Alagna's Romanian-born wife Angela Gheorghiu. On that piece he is accompanied only by a choir, but elsewhere you will hear the symphonic arrangements of conductor Robin Smith, who leads the London Symphony Orchestra. They're about halfway in between Hollywood and the soberer traditional arrangements of carols, and sometimes they seem to compete with Alagna's voice rather than complement it. Some of the choral parts were obviously dubbed in and don't quite mesh with Alagna's singing, either. The omission of texts in the booklet is a flaw -- how many of the potential buyers will understand Romanian? -- but on several pieces Alagna sings different verses in different languages. This is a pleasantly offbeat Christmas program from a singer who is looking like a strong candidate to fill the shoes of one, at least, of the Three Tenors; it's just the thing to put on the CD player when the old holiday standards begin to cloy.